I’ve been waiting 28 years to see if the other shoe would ever drop on the Tron universe. It has, and the result is visually stunning, intellectually engaging and emotionally exhausting.

As you might imagine, Tron: Legacy, which opens Friday, was a must-see movie for me. When the original Tron came out in 1982, I had just begun working as a mainframe systems programmer. I’d been working with computers for a decade, first in school and then professionally, so I knew a fair bit about them. Tron fascinated me because it was the first attempt to show what happens inside a computer. In doing so, it pushed the boundaries of filmmaking, both technically and artistically, in just about every way imaginable.